How to edit 360° Videos


360° videos can allow a user to immerse users into a place. Sometimes you capture more video than you want and you might need to edit some of the content. The problem is that using a regular video editor removes needed spatial metadata and the video will not display properly. This is where this guide on how to edit 360° videos comes to help.

Editing your 360° Video

You can actually edit your 360° video using any video editor but most editors don’t natively display 360° properly. You can still cut out the segments that you do not want and stitch the sections that you want to keep together.

Shotcut
Shotcut

Shotcut is a powerful open source video editor and you can use that out of the box to edit the video just like you would edit any other video. After you open the video and put it in the timeline, find the part that you want to cut and click on the “Split video at play head” at the beginning of the section you want to delete and at the end. That should put the entire segment that you want to delete as a separate part. You can select that and press the delete key and viola! It’s gone. Finish by exporting the video.

If Shotcut is too complex, you can also use a tool like Avidemux to cut out the segment(s) that you don’t want to include. To do this, open the video in Avidemux, using the A->B buttons, select the beginning and end of the segments you want to keep. That will skip the parts that you don’t want. You’ll wind up with several videos that you’ll need to append together – open the first segment and then File>Append the other segments.

When you’re done editing your video, make sure you save it as an MP4 video. This, along with the spherical size, is what the metadata injector will be looking for.

Using the Spatial Media Metadata Injector

The key component before uploading your video to YouTube is using the spatial media metadata injector to put back the 360° video metadata.

The Spatial Media Metadata Injector
The Spatial Media Metadata Injector

Start by downloading the Spatial Media Metadata Injector from Github. There’s really nothing to install so just copy the files to a separate folder that you can access. Run the GUI program and open your edited 360°. Press “Inject metadata” and it will create a new video and add the suffix “injected” to the video name. That’s the video that you want to upload to YouTube.

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide on how to edit 360° videos helps you produce cleaner 360°. Have fun!

360° Video of driving up Mount Mitchell